A commentary on the case of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, convicted of the murder of 270 people in the Pan Am 103 disaster.

Friday, 14 August 2009

Government and intelligence services influence on media coverage of Lockerbie

[The following are excerpts from an exclusive article just published on the website of the Scottish lawyers' magazine The Firm.]

Magnus Linklater, the editor of the Scotsman newspaper at the time of the Lockerbie investigation, has revealed that UK Government and intelligence services influenced coverage of the Lockerbie inquiry to implicate Iran and Syria.

Linklater admitted that both the police and UK Government ministers directed the newspaper to concentrate their coverage on Iranian and Syrian links with the downing of Pan Am 103, the suspects initially favoured by the US and UK administrations.

"This is not just conspiracy theory," Linklater said.

"It is sometimes forgotten just how powerful the evidence was, in the first few months after Lockerbie, that pointed towards the involvement of the Palestinian-Syrian terror group the PFLP-GC, backed by Iran and linked closely to terror groups in Europe. At The Scotsman newspaper, which I edited then, we were strongly briefed by police and ministers to concentrate on this link, with revenge for an American rocket attack on an Iranian airliner as the motive."

This line of inquiry was heavily promoted by the US and UK Governments for two years until the invasion of Kuwait, when the coincidental requirement to use Iranian airpsace to bomb Iraq became a priority. Libya was then identified as the prime suspect.

The involvement of Iran and Syria has been promoted consistently as an alternate explanation for the Lockerbie event, and PFLP-GC group member Mohamed Abu Talb was named by the two accused, Megrahi and Fhimah, in their special defence of incrimination. However, only three of the hundreds of listed defence witnesses were actually called at the trial, and this avenue of inquiry was never explored in a judicial forum. (...)

The lack of evidence in the circumstancial case against Megrahi and Fhimah has been the focus of much of the criticism of the judgement against Megrahi. Material submitted to the trial as semtex explosives evidence had in fact been found to have been manufactured from test explosions.

Linklater does not disclose why the newspaper did not undertake its own investigations. However he did state how former Lord Advocate Lord Fraser expressed concerns to him about whether the CIA could have been involved in planting some of the "evidence".

"I don’t know. No one ever came to me and said, ‘Let’s go for the Libyans’, it was never as straightforward as that. The CIA was extremely subtle," Fraser is reported to have said.

[An article on the issue by Mr Linklater appears in today's edition of The Times. He is currently the newspaper's Scottish Editor.]

If what Mr. Linklater has said is true then the Scottish media has more to account than its judiciary ever could. For him to claim that intelligence and police agencies "influenced" the news clearly show his lack of independence, something which Americans would never tolerate. Just because he may have been briefed that the initial suspects were the Palestinians from Germany (at the behest of Iran)does not mean there was any evidence to prove that.The Times On Line story states "how powerful the evidence was... that pointed to the ...PFLP-GC...." Nothing could be further from the truth. There was no evidence at all, just rumor, innuendo and speculation. I would have liked to see the police ask any prosecutor in the US or Scotland to take that "evidence" into court. If some people in the UK believe the case against Megrahi is weak, the one against (based on EVIDENCE) the PFLP-GC is non existent. There are enough pieces of evidence against Libya generally and Megrahi specificaly to convince me the conviction was righteous.

Much more substantial circumstantial evidence exists against the apartheid regime in South Africa (party of ministers and officials booked on Pan Am Flight 103, but all 23 cancelled the booking): can Mr Marquise confirm that he personally checked out this highly suspicious South Africa connection to the Lockerbie bombing?

Dear Mr. Marquise, where do you live, when you dare to write such a sentence: “...lack of independence, something which Americans would never tolerate…”?It cannot be in the USA, where practically all the main media voluntarily followed a criminal gang – Mr. W., his master Dick Cheney and others - into the Iraq war to (above all) secure the oil sources for American companies.Your sentence shows a vast amount of arrogance and a total lack of competence to judge. How could we then trust your other judgments?

Dear Mr. Marquise, where do you live, when you dare to write such a sentence: “...lack of independence, something which Americans would never tolerate…”?It cannot be in the USA, where practically all the main media voluntarily followed a criminal gang – Mr. W., his master Dick Cheney and others - into the Iraq war to (above all) secure the oil sources for American companies.Your sentence shows a vast amount of arrogance and a total lack of competence to judge. How could we then trust your other judgments?

In his interesting book Mr. Marquise admits that there is only circumstantial evidence in the case. And he admits that even the CIA came to the conclusion that the collected evidence was not strong enough to go to the court.

There is Tony Gauci as evidence he clearly stated that he sold the clothes later found in the suitcase. yes he was uncertain in court as to whom exactly he sold them to but he was certain when he said it before and nervous as evidence in this case. The vast majority of the medics in Britains state health service who dealt with Megrahi were outraged as they had not signed or sent off a prognosis saying that megrahi had 3 months to live or even that he had prostate cancer, most of them also say even if he did It is damn surprising that he still lives. Also most experts say that in the final stages of prostate cancer -which Mr Megrahi was diagnosed to be in- NO ONE would have been in any condition to travel to another country let alone walk of the plain as he did.So please dont say there is no evidence when there really is

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